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The marvelous meeting of the main characters is all Frank Borzage and zero Ernest Hemingway: The American lieutenant (Gary Cooper), soaked in wine and using a giggly showgirl's high-heel to describe the art of architecture, is interrupted by an air raid but continues his thesis with the ankle of the British nurse (Helen Hayes). The Great War, "the Marne and the Piave," una prova per amanti. "Tonight who cares, and tomorrow who knows?" Their consummation takes place in a churchyard under the stars, the embrace dissolves to a tower backlit by explosions. Austrian shrapnel in a foxhole lunch ("I was blown up eating cheese") leads to a remarkable reunion—the subjective camera gives Cooper's view from a gurney moving through a Milanese infirmary (Dreyer's coffin ride in Vampyr is concurrent), concluding with Hayes leaning in to kiss the lens. Rivalry with the surgeon (Adolphe Menjou) and sympathy from the chaplain (Jack La Rue), "sacred subjects are not good for soldiers." The author's hard-boiled pose versus the director's unguarded romanticism, Borzage wins in the end with a full-scale showcase of his favorite themes. He tracks across a rainy street and cranes up to the window above a café, then dissolves to the Italian painting inside and tracks to the bedroom (past a strategically placed mirror), where a bit of offhand intimacy has the tiny heroine biting her strapping beloved's chin. (The train whistle in the distance is only one of the outside world's omens, which also include military trucks and wandering searchlights.) Armistice rings out but the lovers are too busy to notice, locked in a tragic jubilation of their own. "In life and death, we'll never be parted." Buñuel recalls the ending in his version of Wuthering Heights, Wagner and all. With Mary Phillips, Blanche Friderici, Mary Forbes, Gilbert Emery, and Paul Porcasi. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |